Esquisse pour l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris : La Ville de Paris conviant le monde à ses fêtes

This earlier esquisse for the Hôtel de Ville de Paris commission, dated 1890, predates the 1893 variant by three years and provides evidence of Benjamin-Constant's extended development process for the monumental ceiling decoration of the Salle des Fêtes. The commission was one of the most prestigious decorative assignments in Third Republic France, part of the effort to make the rebuilt Hôtel de Ville a showcase of contemporary French official culture. Benjamin-Constant's work on the commission stretched across several years of preparatory sketching, compositional revision, and color testing before the final execution, and these early esquises document the evolution of his thinking. The 1890 sketch likely represents an earlier stage of the compositional development than the 1893 variant, showing how he worked through the problems of ceiling-scale allegory — how to make figures readable from below, how to distribute weight and visual activity across a vast surface, how to integrate the allegory of Paris with the festive celebration the hall was designed to host.

The early sketch stage shows Benjamin-Constant establishing the broadest compositional decisions — major figure groupings, the central personification, the architecture that organizes the allegorical space. Brushwork is even freer than in the 1893 version, recording ideas rather than resolved solutions.